Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
moment. It could come crashing down on
her like the ice storm that was her fate.
Coating her eyes and her tongue and
crusting deep beneath her fingernails.
Turning her a color she’d never been
before. Making her do terrible things.
But I didn’t sense that in her—and I’m
sure I would have, traveling through her
wants and thoughts and aches and regrets
and wonderings as I did, once she let me
in. I slid on her consciousness like trying
on a borrowed dress. There was nothing
wrong with that dress, even if it didn’t
fit me exactly.
I didn’t think she’d come to hurt me. I
knew all she wanted was to talk.
To tell me.
She told me everything up until the
moment she disappeared.
The before, I could see and
experience and mull over. And the
during—the accident, the car sliding
circles on the ice and crashing sideways
into the guardrail, that slice of fast-
moving time that came so suddenly—
that, I could play back in slow motion.
Pause and hover over. Investigate. It was
only the after that I couldn’t guess at,
couldn’t pierce a hole through.
Probably because she had a hard time
seeing it, too.
She told me about Lila, who was
hosting the party in her father’s finished
basement. She told me how none of this
would have happened if not for Lila’s
party,
one
Natalie
wasn’t
even
technically invited to, seeing as she and
Lila weren’t what could be called
friends. She’d tagged along to the party
anyway because of some boy. If she
hadn’t met that boy when she’d served
him a burger and fries at Murray’s,
where she waited tables two days a
week, if he hadn’t grabbed ahold of her
wrist when she’d walked by his booth
and slipped the napkin onto her tray, the
one where he’d written, in sloppy boy-
handwriting—
Babe you are hot. when
you get off work want to go to party
later? let me know
—and signed with his
name (Paul), then she wouldn’t be
haunting
me
in
bathrooms
and
whispering her story in my ears. She’d
be back home, alive, and I wouldn’t
know her.
She wanted me to get a sense of how
it was, up where she lived. How little
there was to do up there. How boring it
was, especially in winter, if you
couldn’t afford to ski. So she may have
despised Lila—in the locker room after
phys ed she’d heard the girl call her a
psychopath like her psychopath mother,
and in the hallway out of sight of the
teachers, Lila had let Natalie know how
she
felt
about
psychopaths
with
psychopath mothers. The girl had claws.
But she’d go to her party. Where else
was there to go?
The drive up the mountain was
uneventful. When they’d started the
climb up the mountain pass, it hadn’t
even begun snowing yet. But by the time
they were crawling to the top, searching
out the marker for Lila’s parents’
driveway, the sky ahead was shrouded
in a thick white sheet.
Since the guy who’d invited her was
driving—this was his old ’65 Mustang
coupe, oily and black in the night—she’d
sat in the front and could ignore the
looks from his friends. They were
townies like her, and they’d all heard the
stories of her mother.
But Paul, who was driving, wasn’t
from around there, so he had no idea.
There wasn’t a reason for a party,
except that Lila’s father was letting them
use his finished basement. That’s why
everyone drove up to the highest heights
of Plateau Road when a snowstorm was
expected. Lila’s house was at the tiptop
of the mountain, down a squirrelly dirt
driveway that fractured from the main
road, so that cars had to be parked out
on the road itself, making those who
came in sneakers have to ice-skate their
way to the front door. But her father had
a fully stocked bar and a billiards table
in the carpeted lower level of the house.
And the soundproof door at the top of the
stairs locked from the inside, so her
parents couldn’t check the booze supply
till morning.
It was Tim, the hippie, who brought
the pills. And it was Tim the hippie who
insisted on the orange juice, saying you
could enhance the roll on vitamin C. It
was Jeannette who said there was a
store close by, halfway down the road. It
was Paul who volunteered to drive.
And that’s how Paul and Tim and
Jeannette and Natalie had all gone back
out for the car. And this was also how
Natalie slipped on the ice that was now
falling from the sky and grabbed for the
first solid object, the hood of the car,
and that’s how the zipper of her coat
caused a nick in the paint.
Paul let her in the car, but he made her
sit in back this time.
They were on the road when the drug
kicked in, on a narrow lane skirting the
edge of the mountain, blinded by
shooting snow. The white battering the
hood was the same white flitting into the
sky and the same white slapping the
windshield. All was white.
You can’t know how long it’ll take to
trickle into your system, Tim had told
them, but it’s not instantaneous, and they
probably had a good half hour, so it’ll
be a smooth ride in, so gentle you won’t
know until—
Jeannette smiled and said she felt it
right now. Shit, man—she felt it.
Paul, the one driving, slowed to a
crawl. He spoke over his shoulder to
Natalie, who was in the backseat behind
him, forgetting that she’d nicked the
paint job on his car now, saying, “Whoa,
you feel that?” like they shared the same
body and were feeling the same things.
She told him she did. She told
everyone in the car that she felt it. In
fact, she felt other sensations instead.
Like how cold it was, so cold since Paul
hadn’t let the car warm up before
shifting it into drive, and colder still
because Paul had the window cracked.
Also she felt a climbing ache in her
head, probably from the overpowering
scent of gasoline. Was the car’s gas tank
leaking?
None of this was an effect of the drug.
She was completely sober.
What no one knew was that Natalie
had pocketed the pill Tim had given her.
She didn’t know, and never would get
to, what it felt like to “roll,” as Tim
called it, on a white winter’s night while
driving.
They didn’t know she was faking. The
snow seemed funny to Jeannette, so
Natalie pretended it was funny to her,
too. Tim was mesmerized by the seat
vinyl, how soft it was, how beautiful, so
Natalie
spent
a
long
moment
contemplating its perfectly smooth skin.
Paul kept watching her instead of the
road, and she wanted to tell him to keep
a lookout for other cars and for patches
of ice and swift turns that would veer
them off the side of the mountain.
Also, she wanted to ask, haven’t they
driven far enough? Wasn’t the store
supposed to be just down the road?
But if she did that, she’d reveal she’d
only pretended to swallow the pill. That
she’d lied.
It was only that she didn’t want to
lose control. She didn’t want to have no
sense of what was real or unreal, to
think everything was wonderful when it
actually wasn’t wonderful, which was
what Tim had told everyone who hadn’t
done it before to expect after the
chemical seeped into their bloodstreams.
Everything Tim had described was the
last thing Natalie would have ever
wanted, especially knowing she wasn’t
among friends.
To lose control?
To not know what was real?
That would be too much like looking
down at her hands and seeing they’d
become her mother’s hands. Like
looking into the mirror, as Natalie did
every single day since the two
consecutive life sentences were decided,
and gazing into the eyes of a woman who
could plunge a knife into a man’s
stomach forty-seven times and then bag
him up with his gym socks and his tennis
racket and leave him at his wife’s door
to be discovered when she went out to
get the newspaper Sunday morning.
Natalie didn’t, couldn’t be sure, what
she was capable of, having this woman
for a mother, and so she could never let
go the way the others could. She’d never
get so inebriated she’d climb atop the
bar in a basement rec room and pitch
herself face-first into the arms of
whoever would catch her, like Lila had
before the orange-juice run.
And yet somehow, sober, Natalie had
gotten herself talked into going for a ride
in Paul’s Mustang. And she was sober
when Jeannette turned to her in the
backseat of the moving car and said, as
if she’d only just noticed her, “Natalie
Montesano? Natalie, is that you?”
Jeannette’s pupils had grown to two
black nickels, gargantuan against the
shrinking sea of her irises. She wasn’t
slurring; she was talking as if she didn’t
know how to make full use of her mouth.
“Wait.” She seemed confused. “Wait.
Why
don’t we like you?”
And that was all it took. The fine
feeling, the open mind, the sense of
adventure in agreeing to go on the drive
in the snowy night, it all left Natalie.
And good riddance. In its place came
disdain. Pulsed through with rage.
Woven with hate.
Maybe there was a piece of her
mother inside her after all. It wouldn’t
cause her to grab a sharpened object and
plunge it into the closest chest—three
hearts to choose from in this car. It had
always been subtler, inside Natalie. It
made her not care. Not about herself,
and not about anyone else.
She didn’t care if they all died on this
road tonight.
When she did it, it was without
thinking, and it was also as if she’d been
premeditating it for years: She reached
her arm forward into the front seat and
she said, “Watch out for that car!”
There was no other car. There was
only the car they were in, which
shuddered when the brakes were
jammed, and then slid. Soon the old
Mustang was careening across the ice,
not going straight and not going
sideways, and there was the railing at
the road’s edge, and there was the space
ahead of it, filled only with air and
emptied of trees.
There was this moment before the car
made impact, so of course she
remembered
it,
where
she
saw
everything that was happening and was
about to happen and understood it in a
way she didn’t know life could be
understood.
Then she saw the guardrail come for
them—and beyond that, the gaping edge
of the mountain—and this was when she
screamed. She screamed the way the
man’s wife did when she found the bag
with the body, the way a madwoman
would scream when she tore open the
guts of a lying, two-timing man. She
screamed, and then the car jolted to a
stop.
She showed me how she screamed,
and my ears rang for days.
—
25
—
NATALIE’S
story doesn’t end
there, with the accident. There was what
came after.
If anyone could have been on that
mountain to see the smashed black
Mustang, if they’d been peering in
through the cracked windshield to where
Natalie lay in the backseat, they would
have wondered what might happen to
her. Would any of the kids who’d been
in the car come back for her, and why
hadn’t anyone tried to wake her first